OCS Archive Site

ICARDA

By Ahmad Al-Mously

Just like the other Centres, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) OCS technical team receive different requests for support which include report development, access granting, and change in parameters of processes. Although the Centre had implemented a helpdesk system, which is working fine and already contains thousands of support tickets, there was need to make sure that certain support requests go through the proper channels of approvals in order to:1- Obtain the approvals of the supervisor(s) of the requestor (usually key business users).

2- Obtain the approvals of other stakeholders in the system (such as ITU head, or Director of Corporate Services).

3- Follow a proper system development lifecycle where a business user presents requirements that are reviewed, implemented and confirmed by the requestor.

4- Make sure that all members of the OCS technical team are aware of the change.

5- Generate reports of requests by category.

6- Centralize all requests with approvals for audit purposes.

The OCS technical team achieved all the above by creating a Request for System Change in UBW using forms and applying a workflow. The form has a collection of required fields in order to categorize the request, explain the need, and add comments by different workflow approvers.

The technical team implemented this in June 2016, and the form has successfully captured about 70 requests so far.

The graphs below show the distribution of requests by area and by module. The majority of requests were related to financial reporting.